I have to get out of here. I am not just performing at the mall, I am staying at the mall. There is a hotel... in the mall. It seems to be a themed hotel though the theme of my floor is a bit ill-defined. There are horses on every door and the design is to make it look like they are stable doors. I am staying in a stable of horses that look exactly the same. Some kind of genetic experiment stable theme is in effect here.

I have been walking around what is the largest mall in North America for four days now. If I were at a another point in my life the feeling of walking through a closed mall after a 10:30 show filled with drunken chaos and aggressive on-stage comedy crowd management would have had a powerfully negative effect on my mental well-being. I would say at another point in my life, the only thing to do after walking down a hall full of horses, drained and questioning my life choices, angry at the level of hammered douchebaggery exhibited at the club, would be to walk into the room and hang myself from the shower rod. I am happy to say that the closest I came to that mindset was perhaps thinking about how one would autoerotically asphyxiate himself. I had a belt. Fortunately I wasn’t sad enough to google instructions and I didn’t want to David Carradine myself, Grasshoppers. So, I took a quick look at a scan someone sent me of the feature on WTF and me in the new Entertainment Weekly and I realized, deeply, I am not in the same place I was. I went to sleep and dreamed of the Wild West.

I will say this about The Comic Strip in Edmonton. It is a well laid-out club and I had good shows. A first happened there. I was dealing with a sad drunk heckler for a good ten minutes. We went back and forth several rounds and he was hanging on the ropes of his booze-soaked psyche and before he dropped to the mat he mooned me. The crowd hushed and I put my hand over my brow to shade the spotlights and saw, hanging over the tier of the back seats, a naked butt. It was the last recourse of a desperate heckler. A final bare-assed shot across the bow of the room. Sadly, he was removed from the show. It’s one thing sparring with words but once asses are unsheathed it is time to go.

This week the eloquent and entertaining raconteur that is Larry Miller will be on the show Monday, and the intense and truthful Chris Titus on Thursday. Hope you dig them.